Kindle iOS app now allows vertical scrolling, window splitting

Update: Vertical scrolling is now available on the Kindle app for Android.

iPad and iPhone owners using recent versions of iOS can now scroll through Kindle books, not just turn pages. Props to Amazon for heeding pleas from TeleRead and others. In another welcome move, Version 6.5 will let you resize your Kindle window in split view—so you can more easily use other apps at the same time while reading. To give one example, you’ll be able to see a book at the same time you’re commenting on it in an email.

Activate vertical scrolling simply by going to Settings for the app. Thoughtfully, Amazon lets you turn it on and off in Aa menu within the book you’re reading. Not all books will allow scrolling—the feature didn’t work on two books that I’d downloaded from nonAmazon sources. Public domain fans and others undoubtedly would appreciate scrolling on all books. What’s more, you can’t use the continuous scrolling to make it easier to select material that starts on one page and goes on to the next. Ouch! Also, there is no auto scroll, which I don’t use but which some users would dearly love. On top of everything else, the Kindle’s Android app lacks vertical scrolling. And how about about devices like the Fires? What’s more, due to technical challenges of the current E Ink, I wonder if vertical scrolling will come to devices like the Paperwhite and Oasis.

Still, I suspect that that vertical scrolling will reach Android apps and Fires soon. Meanwhile the scrolling option for iOS apps is definite progress—or maybe Back to the Future. The Kindle app for the old Fire Phone offered vertical scrolling.

I know. Some people will wonder, “Why the devil does vertical scrolling matter? Why did Amazon follow the example of Apple and many others in adding it to ebook applications?” Well, vertical scrolling is great for people who simply want to focus on part of the page and let their fingers rather than their eyes do the work. An individual preference. But many users these days use that approach for Web surfing.

Reason Two? If your cover or something else blocks the bottom of the text, you can easily work around this.

I’d like to add a third reason for Amazon making the change: it will be easier to highlight material that starts at the bottom of the page and continues on to the next. But when I tried a mix of continuous scrolling and highlighting on Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America—brilliant reporting and smooth writing!—I received the following error message: “We do not currently support selection and related features while reading with continuous scrolling. Switch to the paginated view to use these features.”

See why, after all these years, I’m as much a support as ever of an industry-standard format like ePub and why I loathe DRM? Why should Amazon dictate how we read a book? In Jeff Bezos’s shoes, I’d actually consider an ePub option, as well as lean heavily on publishers to replace DRM with watermarking, so books could be read on a number of devices. I’d still buy as many Amazon books as ever. Amazon would still be highly competitive on price; and all those reader reviews and other social features would still lead major competitors. Furthermore, at a time when anti-trust concerns are greater than before, Amazon would gain valuable goodwill that would be reflected not only in terms of regulatory concerns but also in terms of stock prices.

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Published by David Rothman

David Rothman is the founder and publisher of the TeleRead e-book site and cofounder of LibraryCity.org. He is also author of The Solomon Scandals novel and six tech-related books on topics ranging from the Internet to laptops. Passionate on digital divide issues, he is now pushing for the creation of a national digital library endowment.
View all posts by David Rothman

You mention that it didn’t work for books for downloaded from other sources. It appears that continuous scrolling is tied to the KFX format and so won’t be available (without a lot of effort) except in books purchased from Amazon.

If I read you right, it doesn’t allow you to tilt your iPhone to start the scrolling. That’s a feature the Instapaper app has that I like. Not that it matters—my aging iPhone doesn’t have enough space for the now-179 MB app plus what the ebooks would take. A pulled the Kindle app off some months ago. Amazon really should give those who have limited storage space a light version that’s reading only.

Do you know what would be great with this new scrolling feature? I’ve often gripped that Amazon doesn’t let the left and right buttons on Bluetooth mice page through a document. The same benefit would be true of the scrolling wheel on many BT mice. Added to Kindle devices, that’d make reading easier, particularly for those with mobility issues.

@Michael and @Jhowell: Absolutely agree about the usefulness of scrolling wheels. Re connection to KFX format: If that’s the case, then this is another example of the damage from Amazon’s proprietary ways.

This is the first iteration on Continuous Scrolling. They are sure to add ability to select/highlight in a future iteration. Note that Speak Screen does not work with it, either.

I have not seen anyone do a good implementation of auto scroll, and I have tried a number of them. For example, the Fire Phone’s was promising, but it didn’t work well: scrolling was not smooth, and would jump unpredictably before one had read something. It also depended on 4 front facing cameras to figure out the angle and adjust scrolling speed, so even if they had fixed the issues, it would never work on any other device. Other implementations use a fixed scroll rate, or rely on accelerometer to control rate, and these tend to be brittle: too hard to control, don’t work when lying down etc. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it is hard to converge on something that the tiny fraction of scrolling fans find natural and intuitive, and clearly preferable to manual scrolling. Perhaps when they implement Speak Screen and VoiceOver for scrolling mode, this will be a sort of auto-scroll controlled by reading speed. Another thing they should add is basic keyboard navigation, so you can scroll with arrow keys and perhaps have hot keys for adjusting text properties, jump to adjacent chapters, etc. (compare with iBooks keyboard support).

The reason I like to use scrolling mode sometimes is that it prevents ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ that for some reason are still endemic to digital reading. Especially when an image caption and the image it describes get put on different pages. I also feel having to interact more to scroll helps me focus. For example I like to scroll so the next paragraph starts at top of the page.

Split View (Slide Over works too) is something all reading apps should support. Some reading will be enhanced by multitasking: note taking, finding locations on a map, Wikipedia etc. It looks like they’ve done a solid job with this: everything adjusts nicely to whatever part of the screen you have the Kindle app running in.

This is just one more reason why iBooks on the iPhone continues to be the ereader industry leader. Although the Apple ecosystem is closed, they have been able to use that position to consistently deliver user experiences with both high reliability and usability. It’s not surprising that Amazon was effectively forced to deliver vertical scrolling for the iOS platform first, since Apple mobile users have a real choice with the iBooks store. Android users, unfortunately, are not so lucky, since, in practice, they have vendor lock-in with Amazon.

Many years ago I had a win phone that had ereader and it auto scrolled just fine and you stopped it to highlight. Barnes and Nobles bought them out and I lost most of my considerably large library and they seized the auto scroll. If over 10 yrs ago you could get auto scroll on cellure phones I find it must be some other theory such as come in and buy paper at our stores rather than they cant do auto scroll. I have not bought a Barnes and Nobles book at a store since they bought ereader.

The scrolling feature appears to be affecting page reads on KU and KOLL this isn’t fair to authors. I don’t have my books on Kindle Select so I can make no money off of them. They can fix it or they’ll probably lose a lot of Kindle Select authors. And people won’t pay for KU if there isn’t a lot of books available.

Unfortunately, that method doesn’t work for me. There’s no way to get the Aa or Library up. Now that my xPhone is using the scroll feature, all I can get to is portrait/landscape lock, bookmark, and highlighting.

M Yergenson: Thank you very much for calling the issue to my attention. On my iPad, continuous scrolling still works fine with the Kindle app. But, no, I don’t see it on either my Android phone or tablet. Was it ever there were in the first place? Not originally at least. What kind of OS are you using? At one point, did you see continuous scrolling working on an Android device? If so, I’d be very curious why it’s no longer there. I can call Amazon support and find out what happened. But first please tell me more about your situation. Needless to say, I would also welcome hearing from others about whether anything may have changed.

I’ve only used my Apple phone and iPad. I don’t use android devices. My software is up to date. My kindle app in version 6.10. I’m wondering if it changed in that version.
It no longer had an option for scrolling.

M Yergenson: 6.10 is the same iOS version I’m using on my iPad Pro. I’d very much encourage you to reach out to Amazon Support and find out what’s happening. Please let us know. At this end, I don’t see any change, but who knows what’s going on at your end? I’m assuming you’ve noticed the change on both of your iOS devices, and that just adds to the mystery. I’m curious if your iOS devices are recent. That could be a factor as well, although I suspect you couldn’t run 6.10 if they were too far behind.

I also hate the continuous scrolling. I feel like I’m wearing my fingers down on my iPad screen having to do it. I much prefer a simple tap on the screen to move ahead pages. Thankfully, I found this article when I was googling whether it was possible to turn this off.

Hi, Joy. To turn off the Fire’s vertical scrolling: (1) Open a book. (2) Tap on the center of the screen. (3) Within the Aa menu, look for the switch toward the bottom to turn scrolling on or off. (4) Tap on the related button. I hope that helps. Let me know if you’re still confused. There may be other ways to do turn off vertical scrolling, but that should do the trick. – David

Writers whose books are in Kindle Unlimited (the subscription reading service) who depend on getting paid for EACH page read are not so happy about this scrolling feature. You may not realize it, but Amazon is NOT paying writers for pages read when they are scrolled instead of read via the old page flipping right to left method. Many writers are asking readers to please stop scrolling. Amazon is saying whoops, sorry, but not addressing the issue.